


[fic] hypertext

by youcallitwinter



Category: Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-24
Updated: 2013-04-24
Packaged: 2017-12-09 10:34:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/773201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youcallitwinter/pseuds/youcallitwinter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She thinks sometimes he tries to keep her together with just his hands and dry sarcasm. | The summer of becoming.<br/>[Post 2x22] [Veronica; Logan/Veronica, Weevil, Wallace, Mac, Cassidy, Dick] [oneshot]</p>
            </blockquote>





	[fic] hypertext

**Author's Note:**

> **hypertext**  
>  _veronica mars | veronica; veronica/logan, wallace, mac, cassidy, dick, weevil |_  
>  _nc-17 | post season 2 | warning: mentions of rape, sex, language. ptsd. | > 4700_  
>  _The Age of Innocence_ , she thinks, for no particular reason | The summer of becoming.

Weevil laughs. It is strained. She thinks she should feel guilty.  
  
"You tired of that 09er asshole already, V?"   
  
He has moved to sit farther away on the ground, like her gravity would be dangerous up close. His silhouette is framed by streetlamps, just long shadows and patches of light. She thinks she can almost see Lilly lounging behind the darkness, a flash of blonde and secrets and life, just out of reach. Her fingertips ache to reach out.

"Be nice," she admonishes. She tries to reach the ground, stretching out her toes as far as she can. She can't. So she lets her legs dangle over the ledge, instead. The back of his neck looks like it would probably feel prickly if she touched it.  
  
"Truth, though," he wipes the sweat off with a cloth he's  _using_ , which she could just tell him is stupid, because when he puts it back down, there's grease on his face. She wants to rub it off, so she sits on her hands instead.

"When you take away the daddy issues and the money and the asshole, what you got left?"  
  
"What?" she asks, even though she probably shouldn't. She can smell bacon in the garage, it distracts her.  
  
"Nothing," he says, simply, and she nearly smiles, but she turns it into a frown.  
  
He catches her anyway, and smirks.  
  
"Sometimes," he says, and he is not embarrassed and she is not embarrassed when she is with him, "when I get in a spot of trouble, I say to myself 'What Would Veronica Mars Do', and then I think of you doing Logan Echolls."  
  
His gaze on her is dark for a moment, and she knows he's thinking of her naked, but then his eyes clear, and he's not anymore.  
  
"Damn, girl, you're taking a hard hit to that smartass rep. You ain't gonna recover from that one, you know."  
  
"Shut up," she says, she does not want Weevil to think of her and Logan having sex. She does not want to think of her and Logan having sex. "Do you really?"  
  
He raises an eyebrow, "think of you and Logan Echolls? You got an itch your poor, rich, pansy, boy-toy ain't scratching, V?"  
  
She rolls her eyes, "think of what I'd do. In trouble."  
  
He disappears under the hood of a car, and his snort is distant, muffled by the chrome and the wind, "no."  
  
  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
  
  
"I tried to kiss Weevil," she says.  
  
His body stiffens, muscles going hard under her hands.  
  
"Oh," he says, flatly.  
  
"He didn't kiss back."  
  
She traces the planes of his chest with lazy interest. He doesn't yield. She absently wonders if it's conscious.  
  
"Did he, now."  
  
She nods vigorously. "he said," she tries to re-form the shape of the words, cold, sharp, wet with the night wind, "something about it not being right. That I don't know what I want because I'm too—" but she can't remember exactly, so she lets it go, " _too_." she ends, lamely.  
  
Logan is silent for a long moment, and she thinks he may have fallen asleep. She'd like to sleep. Her eyes feel glued open.  
  
"Still want that kiss?" he asks, roughly, and he's pulling her to him without waiting for an answer.   
  
She can feel the heat curl low in the pit of her stomach, his hands gripping her thighs hard enough to bruise, his tongue heavy in her mouth. Acid and bile and warmth. It doesn't feel so cold anymore.  
  
Logan wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, when he finally pulls back. She vaguely wonders if he thinks he might have caught something. The chlamydia, maybe. She doesn't have that anymore, she wants to tell him. She could have some other STD with an unpronounceable name, something they weren't taught about in health class. The only remainder of a boy long gone. Splattered in parts across a road she doesn't take anymore.  
  
An inexplicable sadness settles in her bones; that's a terrible way to be remembered.

"Hey, isn't it wonderful knowing I have even less honor than streetborn Mexican drug lords?" Logan drawls.

She takes a minute to come down to his words, from her thoughts, from his lips, from the physicality of him that makes her giddy sometimes. She doesn't think he knows that yet. He kisses her like she might leave. She kisses him like she might want him to stay.  
  
His voice is sharp, bright, frayed around the edges, and she realizes with something akin to surprise, he's _jealous._ Even though he has no reason to be _._ Not after everything he's done to her, what she's let him do to her.  
  
"Doesn't it amp the bad boy cred a little? Make you want me a little more? Don't you have that _thing_ for the bad boys?" He isn't even looking at her.  
  
She'd forgotten he's raw here. Forgotten Lilly had done this too.  _Lilly._ She feels closer to Lilly somehow. Like she can understand wanting these boys. Like she can understand wanting  _everything_.

"Weevil isn't a Mexican drug lord," she protests, because she wouldn't have asked a Mexican drug lord to kiss her; there are some things she still believes in. Sometimes. "he isn't even in a motorcycle gang anymore."  
  
"Fuck Weevil," he says, and then his palm is against her breast and she draws in a sharp breath. Maybe he forgot about the STD. Maybe he doesn't care.  
  
Within moments she's strung so tight, it hurts to breathe in, so she stops. Breathing.  
  
"Do you like this," he whispers hotly in her ear, and she blushes at his tone, at the quiet closeness.  
  
"I'm only using you for sex, you know," she laughs, weakly, heart still pounding, because they haven't even  _had_ sex, and that should be  _funny_.  
  
"I can tell," he says, and he doesn't.  
  
Later, she will peel the fortune off her bedroom mirror and stick it on the board above his bed as apology. It's not sticky anymore and keeps coming off, but the numbers light up from behind, and she likes how it looks there: blue, and glowing.  
  
He's been looking at it all summer in her room, like he hasn't even realized he's doing it, but he still hasn't said a word or asked her to love him instead, forget Duncan and love him, and only him, and sometimes she thinks she  _loves_  Logan. She doesn't know if he can tell, but she hopes to god he can't, because she can't let him have that over her, she can't let anyone have that over her.  
  
"What, I don't even get my own two-cent cookie fortune?" is all he says when he sees it, but the next time he kisses her, he does it breathlessly, gorgeously, and sometimes she thinks Logan loves her.

  
  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
  
  
There is no reason for why she ends up with Dick Casablancas on Logan's couch in Logan's hotel room, except he opens the door. She has the choice to bolt, but it's  _Dick Casablancas._ Damned if she runs. Damned if she does that.  
  
"Ronnie," he says dully to her chest, because he's a jackass, and he knows she hates the name.  
  
"Richard," she says to his chest, because that's the only thing at her eye-level, and she knows he hates the name.  
  
He ignores her for a full five minutes, before casually handing her the other controller. She re-familiarizes herself to the buttons without Logan's hands over hers, pressing for her.  
  
"How are you?" she asks, even though she doesn't want to know.  
  
"Beav thought he had it hard, y'know." he says, suddenly. He's still playing the game with manic concentration and she wasn't aware Dick Casablancas could physically do that, use his hands and mouth at the same time without combusting. "All the dudes riffing on him about sex."  
  
"Tragic," she says, dryly.  
  
She can feel the sweat dampen the back of her shirt, settle in the crevices of her body. It makes her feel vaguely dirty. And she thinks she'll have to wash it again.  
  
"But, like," he's still talking and this isn't— "it's not true. He wasn't the  _onl_ y one with the emo problems or whatever, okay. I have problems too. Like, what do I call my penis?"  
  
She thinks she almost understands. "What?"  
  
"So my name's Dick, right," he says, voice neutral, blank, she thinks if she had a distortion machine, those gender-neutralizing ones that people in her line of business hide behind and make it difficult to be found even when she searches so hard, their voices would be the same. The thought makes her want to crawl out of her skin. "I know you're, like, a virgin or whatever—"

He stops for a moment and looks through her and she thinks maybe he doesn't know, and she thinks maybe he does know and doesn't care, "or a certified hooker. The verdict isn't in on that one. The point is; dudes, they name their penises. It's totally a thing. Logan Junior. John Junior. Beaver Junior. Casey Junior."

Beaver Junior was inside her once, she thinks, absently. She can't remember. But when her body bleeds her out every month, and she wakes up with dried blood on the inside of her thighs, just like that one night that one time, she thinks her skin might. John Junior, that's alliteration. She did it in seventh grade. She didn't understand exactly what it was. But she knows that was it.  
  
"But," his hand is bleeding, she notes with distant interest, the sharp edge of the controller pressing against webbed skin, knuckles white with his grip. The uncomfortable wetness between her thighs reminds her she's bleeding too. It makes her feel vaguely comforted. " _I'm_  Dick Junior, you dig? That's the effin' Casablancas family tree: Dick Senior, Dick Junior and Beaver."  
  
They make trees like triangles, she knows, children. She has a bunch of them, all ornamental green and glitter in the Christmas box and they're  _awful_ , but her dad kept them anyway. You can't make a tree with a single point, even an awful one, because that is ridiculous.  
  
"But dude, my penis can't be, like, Dick Junior  _too_ , because that's totally fucking crazytown. So what is it, Dick Junior Junior? You wouldn't take my dick seriously if you heard that, Ronnie. No girl would. That's a  _problem._ "  
  
He probably knows she hates the name because Logan probably told him once. It strikes her as funny that in the midst of everything Dick keeps forgetting, he remembers that.  _Your name is Richard_ , she wants to say, but that would be missing the point.   
  
Logan Junior, she thinks, instead. She can feel the texture of his skin ghosting over her hands, hardsoft and the look in his eyes when she's between his legs and she looks up, and he's watching her, just her. It makes everything in her contract and alight. She doesn't understand how he doesn't burn himself on her, cut himself over her sharp, jagged edges.  
  
She grips her legs harder together. The wetness this time isn't blood. She likes it best when he loses control, and grips too hard. The marks on the flesh are hers and the flesh is hers and the secret is hers. She likes that she doesn't have to piece the bruises together in the morning to form narrative. It's too hot for that.  
  
"But, you know, man, I didn't kill a bunch of people and throw myself off the roof. Way to overreact there, Beav." Dick kicks her with one of those special maneuvers that Logan keeps trying to teach her, but she keeps forgetting the combination for. So she shoots Dick instead. She couldn't kill one Casablancas brother, but she would have. And now she's killed the other.  
  
She feels a twinge of satisfaction as she stands alone on the screen in too-tight clothes, a chest that isn't  _close_  to flat, and legs that go on forever; "game over" flashing in neon colors. She's a slut, but she's a slut with a gun. Which is better than being a stupid virgin with fake bravado who goes and gets roofied and raped. That's alliteration.  
  
"His name," she says, "is Cassidy."  
  
  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
  
  
She throws the first punch. Her hands are bleeding by the fourth. There is no technique behind it, no real fire, even. It isn't like she hasn't dealt with it forever, but somehow it's different, it's different being called slut to her face when she  _knows_.   
  
The kicker is: Enbom doesn't fight back. He just, sort of stands there, weakly resisting. He's too much of a _gentleman_ to punch a girl. The airline money buys indoctrinated social graces of the garden variety.  
  
She laughs out loud.  
  
Enbom looks at her with watering eyes, shirt collar held up to his bleeding nose, "you're such a fucking  _bitch_ , you know, Veronica."  
  
"I know," she says cheerily, teeth and tongue.  
  
"Oh hey," Logan says, when she opens the bedroom door, and he's getting off the phone so he's heard, she knows, "did you read one of those inspirational 'you can be whoever you want to be' quotes graffitied across the subway and decide you wanted to be me?"  
  
She crosses over. For some reason she keeps her hands behind her back, but then he's pulling them in his. He has big hands, it makes her flush with the intimacy of knowledge. Her knuckles feel raw, scraped.  
  
"I'm obviously a bad influence," Logan says, sardonically, but there's a tightness around his eyes and it takes her a moment to realize she put it there.  
  
"Hey, we should make this a weekly ritual, Veronica. You can braid my hair, while I Florence Nightingale the hell out of whatever part of your body you've chosen to damage that week. We can talk about our feelings, eat ice-cream, lament over what happened to John Cusack from the days of yore."  
  
His fingers are gentle against the broken skin and she thinks sometimes he tries to keep her together with just his hands and dry sarcasm.

"So, are you going to tell me what happened, or is that asking for too much at this early stage in our not-relationship?"  
  
She brushes her gauze covered knuckles against his jawline. The finger she raises to her lip feels swollen, broken somehow.  
  
"First rule of Fight Club," she says.

  
  
  
  
  
-

  
  
  
  
  
Mrs. Mackenzie has the best of intentions. "The road to hell," Veronica tells Mac sagely.  
  
They end up sitting in the booth that they'd once come into with Beav— Cassidy and they just can't seem to get anything right this summer. She can feel the carpet burns when she sits back far enough. Each time it stings, she thinks of Logan. It's close to a Pavlovian response. Her legs still feel sore, stretched too far apart, and she aches all over when she moves. Nothing is easy.

She forcibly stops herself from  _no one writes songs._  
  
The dark-haired boy looks at her with mild curiosity, and when she points to Mac and points to herself and says "chaperone", he looks at her with more than mild annoyance. Mac's hair is glossy, and it doesn't have the startling streak of red anymore. That's the part of Mac that died when Cassidy left her naked on the floor, she thinks, the part of her that was red and blue streaks. The thought makes her want to weep.  
  
Mac is silent for the most part, so she talks instead. It's almost like  _she's_  on a date with Mac's dad's colleague's son. She tells him about the classes they're going to take at Hearst and the summer sale schedules of all the department stores. She doesn't tell him about anything that had happened before the moment they walked in this restaurant together. It doesn't belong to him, it's theirs to keep.  
  
He listens politely and nods in all the right places and looks at her like she's fucking  _insane_.  
  
The waiter interrupts just when it's awkward and she had no words left; "do you still serve the Mars bars with your Mac-and-cheese meal?" and when he says "yes," she laughs, laughs hard and it's too loud to be her alone, so she looks over to her side, and Mac is laughing too.  
  
When the guy walks out, bills on table for untouched drinks, she doesn't notice.  
  
And later, when she holds Mac's hair back, while she throws up in the dingy bathroom, throws up everything that's ever gone inside her, Veronica says: "we should do this again, sometime."  
  
And lips wet with bile and blue mouthwash that she knows tastes disgusting because she'd tried some, just to keep Mac company, Mac smiles at her.

  
  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
  


The fourth time Logan returns to find her and Dick on his couch, his eyes flit from one to the other, unreadable. Somedays he is a foreign language.  
  
She thinks she should get up and kiss him. He's her boyfriend or something. Or something. But she feels too tired, so she digs herself deeper in the couch. It sinks in as low as she wants, she likes that.  
  
She's getting too used to this room, she knows. The couch sometimes retains her shape when she gets up now. It's terrifying. Sometimes it's the shape of her full body and the imprint of Logan's hands and knees between the shadow spread of her legs, indented into pleather. When she comes back the next day, the grooves are the same, like he hasn't sat on it since. It's obscene, the image. It makes her flinch.  
  
"You okay," Logan says, careful. She doesn't know who it's meant for. But Dick nods and she nods and that's kind of an answer.  
  
Logan looks like he doesn't know what to do with his hands. Which is strange, because Logan always knows what to do with his hands. He's pulled his sleeves over them, in one of those achingly familiar, childish gestures he has. She can't look, so she looks away.  
  
"We are not friends," she says to Dick, leaning over to clink her beer bottle with his, once.  
  
"No worries there, Mars" he snorts "you're a bitch and you kinda made my kid brother jump off a roof."  
  
She shrugs, and says as snidely as she can manage, "your kid brother kinda raped me."  
  
Maybe she should add that he tried to kill her and killed her dad for all intents and purposes. But the half-aborted acts seem incomplete in the face of his cock in her—  _cunt_ , she thinks, the dirtiest word she can think of, the hardest consonants— and his body splattered twenty feet down. She thinks if she loses it over the  _almosts_ , she'd have to be locked up.  
  
"That's what she said," Dick says, and it's so sick and awful and not even the correct usage, it almost makes her laugh.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Last summer was different, she decides. Making out in Logan's car and outside her door and if she never went in the poolhouse and if he never went in the poolhouse, they didn't mention it.  
  
She thinks of  _The Age of Innocence_  for no particular reason. She'd read it for A.P. English once, she remembers, her eyes full of summer and Stanford and Duncan. Written a paper on it. She still doesn't know what it was about.  
  
But this summer is long-drawn and the hotel room sheets are cool against her skin, and sometimes, when he says sleazy things- because this is  _Logan_ \- it isn't the same, because now there's the possibility that he isn't just saying them.  
  
She has to lower her eyes, her skin heating, and he laughs at her.  
  
And when he looks at her through hooded eyes, voice low,  _dirty_ , even when he's reading a menu, and she  _knows_ what he feels like, hard between her thighs, what he looks like when he's raw, she finds she can't unknow. Even in the moments when she's not experiencing it, she can't unknow. And she finds she doesn't know what to do with her hands anymore.  
  
The first time, her third first time, it's too soon and her taser wounds open into the sheet, the white stained with her. She's spreading across in red.  
  
"Sorry." a shaky laugh.  
  
"What," he says, startled, "no, Veronica—"  
  
"I'll—" she swallows, hard, "I'll clean this up."  
  
"It's okay."  
  
His voice is blank, he doesn't understand. She doesn't understand, either.  
  
"Just," the lights aren't off. She'd wanted him so badly, she hadn't even bothered switching off the lights, "I'll wash these."  
  
"Somebody'll do it later."  
  
He carelessly throws himself back down on the bed. He's graceful in the bedroom, she thinks suddenly, a half-hearted pang of jealousy rising in her throat. He's good with his mouth, his hands, his words. Practiced. She feels clumsy in front of him. What she lacks in experience, she probably makes up for in sheer  _enthusiasm_ , she decides. It makes her flush with embarrassed anger.  
  
It flusters her, this living. The thought that someone else picks up the crumpled sheets in the morning, still smelling of them, someone else washes out the white stains and wet patches. That tomorrow, someone else will pick up the sheet with her blood and scrub her off it.  
  
When she starts gathering up the sheets, she feels the insistent pressure of his hand at her wrist. She's still naked, she dimly realizes. She resists the urge to cover herself because she's too tired.  
  
"Hey," he understands now, she thinks. She still doesn't, "hey, look at me. Veronica, look at me, it's okay. It's okay."  
  
"I'm bleeding out of a gaping chest hole," she says, dryly, "I'm glad you think it's okay."  
  
A hole is all she is, anyway. Her psychoanalysis textbook said so when she was studying for the SATs. A hole, a lack, something missing. Something to be filled up with endless men who aren't a lack. Logan can fill her up. Logan can fill her up, and maybe then she won't be missing anymore.  
  
He doesn't take the bait. "Come to bed," he says, "we'll sleep. Just sleep, Veronica. I can clean you up, okay, let me do this for you."  
  
He can't clean her up. Nothing can. _Let me do this for you._ It's the same thing he'd said the first time he'd gone down on her. He'd looked at her the whole time, and after a while, she'd just closed her eyes to avoid his.  
  
"I can't," she just. she can't. "I have to—" she gestures vaguely.  
  
It takes her a moment to realize he isn't holding her anymore. And then she's missing him so fiercely, it  _hurts_. She's like a crazy person, some detached part of her mind decides. Like, totally fucking crazytown.

He leans against the door, while she scrubs. Doesn't say anything. He doesn't have clothes on, and every time she catches a glimpse of his penis, she can feel the pulse at the base of her wrist, the heat rushing down, down. He's half hard, she's completely wet. The mark waters off to a faded brown under her fingers and there's nothing to do anymore.  
  
She trips, when she gets up, because she's stupid and clumsy;  _slippery when wet_ , she thinks, dully. She braces for impact. Logan catches her, easily. Maybe she lets him. She'd like to think that. That she could be the kind of person who can let people catch her.  
  
And then she's pressing him against the shower wall. Maybe he lets her. She'd like to think that. That he could be the kind of person who falls too.  
  
"No," he says, roughly, "not like this. Do you hear me, Veronica,  _we don't do this like this._ "  
  
He's much too loud in the enclosed space, echoing, and it hurts her head. She takes him in her hand instead, closing her fist over him so he can't talk anymore.  
  
"No," he says again, through gritted teeth, " _fuck you_ , Veronica," and she's just, so tired, of the  _no_ , she'd like something, anything, to be a  _yes_  sometimes.  
  
But when he says  _no_  for the third time, he flips her over anyway, her back hitting the knob, the resulting trickle of water, cold. She shivers.  
  
The staccato pounding in her head matches his uneven rhythm as he slides in. Hands on either side of her, water dripping over his hair, eyes. She is hot, breathless, tense, with just standing, and she doesn't stop looking, can't stop looking, because he's so achingly beautiful like this. And if she thinks of Cassidy once, she does not think of him again.  
  
Her chest hurts, and when she looks down, she's bleeding again. She wants to ironically say something about being  _like a virgin_ _;_  a simile, not a metaphor- not something, but  _like_  something _._ But then he'll stop. Because Logan, Logan doesn't know how to deal with it, not yet, and she's doesn't want to stop his roving hands or his frenzied words, telling her he loves, he loves her, he loves her  _so much, so fucking much, Veronica._

When she comes, biting into skin, there's no wet stain on stark sheets to wash off; she just turns to water, watching herself drain away. She's the water, she's the blood, and she's the flesh. She's so many things.  
  
Logan drops his head on her shoulder, breathing hard, bending down awkwardly to reach. The sweat and shower-water trickle down his back, and she can see his shoulder muscles tensing under his skin with the steady, cold stream, his body hot to the touch.  
  
And she realizes she's wet again. With just that.  
  
And Lilly says, admiring, "who knew you were such a  _slut_ , Veronica Mars." It's a compliment.

  
  
  
  
-  
  
  
  
  
  
The truth is, the heat makes everything move in slow-motion.  
  
Wallace still carts around balls and hoops almost all the time, but his movements are languid, and he misses so many easy shots that for a moment she's worried he might not make it to the team next year.  
  
After which she remembers there is no team anymore. No more Neptune High. No more yellow lockers and corridors filled with people she hates and journalism class with the guy with a degree in physical education. No more ghosts of dead best friends and ex-lovers and dead boys with remote controls to destroy the world with in their hands.  
  
She can be built over. She can cut her hair again and no one will even know she did, because they won't know it was longer before _._ Sometimes, these days, she thinks in italics.  
  
When the ball thuds again, hypnotic, the dust settles on her and clings, the sweat making tracks of dirt on her skin.  
  
"We're celebrating," she declares.  
  
"Apocalypse now," Wallace asks, fake-brightly, "because that's the only thing I see myself celebrating right now."  
  
"You?" she tries, "Me? Our endless, magical BFF-ness? We're pretty darn fantastic, if I do say so myself."  
  
Wallace considers that for a moment, "I'm Robin, aren't I?"  
  
"If the circus shoes fit," she trails off meaningfully.  
  
Wallace snorts, teasing, "You can't hide it. Always a marshmallow, Mars."  
  
She's corn syrup and sugar and water. She melts in fire and tastes better after, burnt. There are worse things to be, so she shrugs it off.  
  
"No, give me one good reason why we shouldn't?"  
  
"Because," Wallace pretends to think, "I don't know. My girlfriend has a brat stashed somewhere that I didn't know anything about when I stuck it to her?" He is deliberately crude to shock.  
  
"Classy," she says, absently, "but my boyfriend  _is_ a brat so I think I win there."  
  
The word still feels foreign on her tongue when used for Logan. Logan isn't  _boyfriend_. Logan is Lilly's room and Lilly's air vent and Lilly's secret smiles. Logan is lingering glances and innuendos that make her flush and long, drunk declarations of love. Logan is the clever fingers and downtown jealousies and the standing back. Logan is the forgetting.  
  
"Or that part where you," Wallace says, and he's serious, nearly soft with the caring, "I don't know, _almost died_."  
  
"Ah," she says, and smiles, smiles, shading her eyes against the sun, because  _that's the secret_ , "but I  _didn't_."  
  
Logan is waiting, when she gets back. She doesn't know how she knows, because the room is his, but she knows. She's indented into his couch, and when she leaves, he doesn't sit on it. But she always comes back, he has to have noticed by now.  
  
"Honey," she says, flippant, the sun is bright-hot, and she's melting, melting into sweat and dirt and sugar and water and corn syrup. She'll turn his tongue blue, and when he tastes her, she'll be sweet, "I'm home."


End file.
